Waiting for the Barbarians

Glass, Waiting for the Barbarians, R. Salter, E. Perry, Philharmonisches Orchester Erfurt, D. R. Davies (released June 3, 2008) Orange Mountain Music 0039 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Philip Glass premiered this opera, his twenty-first, at Germany's Theatre Erfurt in 2005. Christopher Hampton adapted the libretto for Waiting for the Barbarians from J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel of the same name. The story is set in an unspecified town at the edge of an empire, embroiled in a conflict with an unspecified adversary. The characters' xenophobic, racist paranoia justifies, in their minds, their inflammatory tactics, including taking prisoners, interrogating them under torture, and summarily executing them without trial. Coetzee, a Cape Town-born author who won the Nobel Prize in 2003, had the South African apartheid era in mind, but when Glass approached the work as an opera, it was against the background of the American invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

A government official, a magistrate in a small imperial outpost, begins to disapprove of his government's conflict against a faceless enemy group, the "barbarians." He watches as a colonel and other army officers take over the prosecution of the war in his town. By becoming involved with a barbarian prisoner and trying to stop the torture, the Magistrate becomes a suspect and is himself tortured, which turns the tables on the government but ultimately makes the punishment fall on a man who tried to stop these illegal practices. Some superficial similarities invite comparison to Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater, premiered one year later in 2006: the scenes are connected by "dreamscape" orchestral interludes, the action is commented on by a faceless chorus placed in the pit, the horrors of a society at war are communicated through a small group of individuals.

The live recording on this 2-CD set was made not during the opera's premiere run, in Erfurt in September 2005, but at a 2006 Amsterdam performance by the same forces (although that information is not found in the liner materials). There are more than enough glitches and noises to convince the listener of the value of studio recording (there are also several tracking errors on my second disc, especially in the final tracks). Musically, it is not always the most polished performance. Singers more than once fall out of time with the orchestra, and the solo voices are captured in a close sound that exposes some odd qualities. Glass's music, no surprise, is in the style that one associates with him, but not as austere a version of minimalism as heard in the much earlier Satyagraha, for example. The orchestration is tinged with interesting colors, more varied than some other Glass works, with percussion added, for example, to the wavelike repetitions of short motifs. As I have felt before with Glass, the music would work better with its visual component (Glass's forte, I remain convinced, is the film score). Waiting for the Barbarians is a significant and timely work, but not a home run.

133'46"

More Mozart Concerti

Mozart, Last Concertos (K. 595 and 622), A. Staier, L. Coppola, Freiburger Barockorchester, G. von der Goltz (released February 12, 2008) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901980 Vol. 1 Vol. 2 Online scores: Neue Mozart-Ausgabe

There are so many series of new Mozart concerto recordings being released at the moment. Two of the more traditional, but chamber-minded combinations, featuring Maurizio Pollini and Leif Ove Andsnes, have been under review recently. Having grown up loving the Mozart playing of Alicia de Larrocha with the English Chamber Orchestra, I still favor the historically informed performance (HIP) recordings by Academy of Ancient Music with Robert Levin on fortepiano. On this recent release of Mozart's last piano concerto, with which the composer gave his final appearance as soloist on March 4, 1791, Andreas Staier plays an excellent Christoph Kern reconstruction of an Anton Walter fortepiano. It is the latest installment of a Mozart series by the Freiburger Barockorchester, not devoted exclusively to piano concerti, but following up on discs that include the flute and harp concerto and the wind concerti. The sound of the ensemble of 18th-century specialists is so rarefied (18 strings plus wind soloists on period instruments) that it melds seamlessly with the lighter tone of the fortepiano, as well as a reproduction of Anton Stadler's basset clarinet (or clarinette d'amour in A, by Agnès Guéroult) played with subtle attention to delicate colors by Lorenzo Coppola. His is one of the most satisfying performances of Mozart's truly exquisite clarinet concerto, one of the last pieces Mozart completed, although it was first sketched out a few years earlier. This disc is also unusual in that it relies on manuscript details for some of the interpretation. The clarinet concerto is an attempted reconstruction of the original basset clarinet version, and the piano concerto uses only a string quartet to accompany the soloist when the score is marked "solo" (as opposed to the marking of "tutti"), as well as original cadenzas by Andreas Staier. 59'23"

Mozart, K. 467 and 595, D. Barenboim, English Chamber Orchestra (1997) Seraphim Classics 7243 5 73572 2 7

While Daniel Barenboim is a great musician, his Mozart has always left me a little cold, a judgment that was reinforced while listening to the now cut-rate version of these two Mozart piano concerti. By comparison to the leanness of the Freiburg ensemble, Barenboim's tempi (he was both conductor and soloist) sound flabby, with the length of each movement in no. 27 exceeding Staier's timings by about a minute. Barenboim's take on no. 21 is pleasingly light-handed in the first movement (overall it is the more pleasing of the pair on this disc), but the famous second movement, marked Andante, is too sentimental, almost seeming stuck in molasses. One is reminded of the comments of René Jacobs about how familiarity with the score of Don Giovanni led to the gradual slowing of its most famous passages. The second movement of piano concerto no. 21 (K. 467) is likely the most famous of the Mozart canon, since its use in a film from which it has derived a nickname, and Barenboim's reading of it seems similarly burdened with accumulated nostalgia. Still, the playing, of both Barenboim and the English Chamber Orchestra, is able and sensitive, and Barenboim offers his own cadenzas, quite striking, for no. 21. 63'22"

Mozart, Early Piano Concertos (K. 175, 238, 246), D. Greilsammer, Suedama Ensemble (released August 26, 2008) Naïve V 5149

Jerusalem-born pianist David Greilsammer inaugurates what may turn out to be a complete traversal of the Mozart piano concerti, with the Suedama Ensemble (this disc is actually a re-release of an older recording with Vanguard Classics, to celebrate Greilsammer's new contract with Naïve). The instruments are not 18th-century ones, least of all the Hamburg Steinway under Greilsammer's fingertips. This set of three concertos (nos. 5, 6, and 8) are Mozart's first as an adult composer, dating from his late teenage years in Salzburg. (His first four concertos, from Mozart's early adolescence, are juvenile arrangements of other composers' music.) Of the 27 concertos left by Mozart, these three are some of the least often played, but Greilsammer approaches them with freshness and dedication to their attractive qualities, adding embellishments here and there and even replacing Mozart's cadenzas with his own. Greilsammer, who studied at Juilliard and with Richard Goode, has something of an obsession with Mozart, having played a one-day continuous marathon cycle of the Mozart sonatas in Paris earlier this year. He and the Suedama Ensemble, of which he is the artistic director, approach these youthful works with vibrancy, keeping the fast movements ebullient but not harried and the slow ones graceful but not static. Certainly, these are performances that show the early Mozart piano concertos in their best light. Greilsammer and the Suedama Ensemble will perform this fall (December 11) at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Mozart's 22nd piano concerto is on the program. 62'05"

In Brief: Labor Day Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• With hat tip to Bryant Manning, the flamboyant Cameron Carpenter plays Chopin's Revolutionary Etude. On the organ. [YouTube]


• Everything you wanted to know about the renovated Salle Pleyel in Paris. Pictures, too. [Intermezzo]


• Ha! My dislike of Rachmaninov puts me in distinguished company. Alfred Brendel on the subject: "The piano repertoire is vast, and Rachmaninov to me seems a waste of time." John Gibbons valiantly tries to change my mind but leaves me unconvinced. [Holde Kunst]


• With hat tip to Daniel Felsenfeld, composer Mark Adamo has a blog. In it, we learn that we need to congratulate him and John Corigliano, who were married in California earlier this month. [Mark Adamo Online]


• Marie-Noëlle Tranchant reports on an interesting stop in the upcoming apostolic visit of Pope Benedict XVI to France (for the 150th anniversary of the Lourdes apparition). During that trip, he will deliver an address at the newly renovated and about to be rededicated Collège des Bernardins in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. The audience will be composed of representatives from the various domains of the arts and culture in France, and the pope will speak about the relationship of the church and the arts. [Le Figaro]

À mon chevet: The Dying Animal

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

We had once enacted just such a tableau in the flesh, so I was as much remembering as imagining. I had asked her if she would take off her clothes and let me look at her while I played the Mozart Sonata in C Minor, and she obliged. I don't know that I played it any better than I ordinarily did, but that was never the point. In another recurring fantasy, I am telling her, "This is a metronome. The little light flashes and it makes a periodic noise. That's all it does. You adjust the pace to what you want. Not only amateurs like me but professionals, even great concert pianists, have the problem of what's called rushing." Once again, I envision her standing by the piano with her clothes at her feet, as on the night when, fully dressed, I played the C Minor Sonata, serenading her nudity with the slow movement. (Sometimes she would come to me in a dream identified, like a spy, only as "K. 457.")

-- Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (2001), pp. 100-101

This is the third of Roth's books about David Kepesh, and it was the basis of Isabel Coixet's new film Elegy. Embedded below is a video of Friedrich Gulda playing the slow movement of K. 457, which will provide the musical component of the excerpt.

Ionarts at Large: Cleveland Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival

The chill of the surrounding rock in the refreshingly cool and coolly lit Felsenreitschule necessitated a fastening of shawls and pashminas. With a few pieces of the Romeo & Juliet set dangling, Damocles sword-like, above the Cleveland Orchestra’s double bass section (it would be such a pity), Franz Welser-Möst got to show the international audience at the Salzburg Festival what he can do with his “other”, American orchestra in direct comparison to the Vienna Philharmonic’s performances. Judging from their second of three programs on August 24th and their performance week before when they were on opera-duty for Rusalka, America’s youngest of the “Great Five” orchestras can teach their Old Europe counterparts lessons in nuance, luminosity, subtlety, transparency, and delicacy. At least this is true compared to the Vienna Philharmonic’s operatic guise as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra which I last heard under Thielemann (Parsifal: brilliant, though sloppy) and Segerstam (Tristan: very modest).

A.Dvořák, Rusalka Cleveland Orchestra F.Welser-Möst (conductor) Orfeo

The Cleveland Orchestra, at least under Welser-Möst – is not a terribly exciting orchestra and it won’t likely be caught probing the emotional extremes of any given score. But boy, do they sound splendid in what they do. The music they play is made to sound its very best, whether the Andante of the 10th Symphony of Franz Schubert (performing version by Brian Newbould), Bela Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, Bartók’s Viola Concerto, or Johann Strauss’ Emperor Waltz.

The chill of the surrounding rock in the refreshingly cool and coolly lit Felsenreitschule necessitated a fastening of shawls and pashminas. With a few pieces of the Romeo & Juliet set dangling, Damocles sword-like, above the Cleveland Orchestra’s double bass section (it would be such a pity), Franz Welser-Möst got to show the international audience at the Salzburg Festival what he can do with his “other”, American orchestra in direct comparison to the Vienna Philharmonic’s performances. Judging from their second of three programs on August 24th and their performance a week before when they were on opera-duty for Rusalka, America’s youngest of the “Great Five” orchestras can teach their Old Europe counterparts lessons in nuance, luminosity, subtlety, transparency, and delicacy. At least this is true compared to the Vienna Philharmonic’s operatic guise as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra which I last heard under Thielemann (Parsifal: brilliant, though sloppy) and Segerstam (Tristan: very modest).

The Cleveland Orchestra, at least under Welser-Möst, is not a terribly exciting orchestra and it won’t likely be caught probing the emotional extremes of any given score. But boy, do they sound splendid in what they do. The music they play is made to sound its very best, whether the Andante of the 10th Symphony of Franz Schubert (performing version by Brian Newbould), Bela Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, Bartók’s Viola Concerto, or Johann Strauss’ Emperor Waltz.

In that repetitively delightful Schubert Andante, the ears indulged in the playing’s great elegance, especially of individual voices (with the oboe as primus inter pares), the strings’ civilized sound, and homogenous brass delicacy. With how many other orchestras would especially the latter claim be an oxymoron?!

Bartók’s Mandarin is an orchestral showpiece with the possibility to earn honors in precision and color. It should also be more than that: When premiered with the pantomime that goes with it, the subject so disturbed the audience (a hooker clamoring for business, an overly excited man, and a bloody end on top), that Cologne’s mayor and chancellor-to-be Konrad Adenauer had subsequent performances canceled. Ideally, the Miraculous Mandarin is not just a test for orchestral splendor, it is musical porn. The Cleveland Orchestra performed superbly but PG13. Full marks on all technical aspects, but deductions for less than lurid story-telling. With Welser-Möst it was a spectacular orchestral show, but absolute music. In the end, one left seduced, but there was no need to wipe blood off the floor.

There was coherence even in chaos – to an effect as if every audience member had been given a set of Pierre Boulez’ ears. Amid supreme clarinets (though the first with too much extraneous air in the most aggressive parts), every part of the orchestra had ample opportunity to shine – and did.

Kim Kashkashian, the ARD-prize winning violist* from Detroit, presented the rarely performed Viola Concerto (like the Schubert, it had to be reconstructed from sketches) impeccably; even that out-of-control hearing aid (or some other electro-acoustical nuisance) could not detract from those long cadenza-like passages that echo in the orchestra, trading fragments with the soloist. The brass, once again showing its superiority over more famous, crassly blaring such sections inother orchestras, was touchingly distant, as if played from far, far away. The many very lyrical sections – not unlike in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto – turned this into yet another showpiece, this time for the viola. Spectacular all around and sure to have won new converts to Bartók.

The Emperor Waltz begins with that most waltzing 4/4 imaginable before a little transformational scene gets the actual ¾ underway. The arch-Austrian Welser-Möst (born in Linz, capitol of Upper Austria) made for a smooth sounding, strangely Prussian execution of the waltz – as if 90 musicians were filmed in the act of exactitudinal skating on an ice rink. Ears and mind were moved and swayed, but one’s heart, feet, and buttocks remained firmly put.

* The Quatuor Ébène, which I reviewed the week before, is also an ARD prize winner. And coincidentally both categories, String Quartet and Viola are part of the upcoming 2008 ARD Music Competition which gets underway in September.

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Carl Nielsen's String Quartets

Nielsen, String Quartets, Vol 2, Young Danish String Quartet (released May 27, 2008) Dacapo 6.220522 Vol. 1

Dacapo Records continues its mission to raise awareness of the music of Danish composers, with the Young Danish String Quartet's set of Carl Nielsen's string quartets. The first volume, from 2007, combined the first and fourth of the numbered quartets with the string quintet, for which the YDSQ was joined on second viola by their teacher and mentor, Tim Frederiksen, first violinist of the (Old) Danish String Quartet. The second volume brings together the remaining two of Nielsen's numbered quartets, no. 2 in F minor and no. 3 in E-flat major, both composed in the 1890s. These are certainly not the only recordings of the Danish composer's string quartets, but it is the first time they have made their way into my ears.

The good news is that they make for good listening, especially when played with the kind of vigor and attention to color and dynamic range as in these performances. The E-flat quartet (no. 3, op. 14) has a particularly striking, somber second movement, which incorporates some daring dissonance and adventurous harmonic progressions. Nielsen later recounted the story of how he lost his first version of this quartet, while he helped a driver who was struggling to get one of his horses up from where it had fallen in the mud. The composer, riding his bike to take the score to the music copyist, left his manuscript with a boy standing by, who ran off with it. If that score is still out there somewhere, it would be very interesting to compare it with the final version of the quartet heard here, which Nielsen had to reconstruct from memory and his sketches.

Other Reviews: New York Times (Anthony Tommasini)

One could probably pass off the F minor quartet (no. 2, op. 5) as a Brahms quartet, which depending on your inclinations could be a good or a bad thing. The similarity is not surprising as Nielsen composed most of the work while on a government travel grant in Germany in his 20s. The hemiola patterns in the first movement, for example, are somewhat if not exactly Brahmsian, and there is a similar tendency toward deeper registers. Its second movement is also noteworthy for its gloomy beauty, and the outer movements pulsate with a restlessly Romantic agitation. The quartets are not far enough along in Nielsen's compositional development to rank with his more daring orchestral scores, for example, but they have remarkable appeal. The sound of this disc, captured in the Danish Radio Concert Hall last summer, is warm and mellow.

63'59"

Krenek Beyond Jonny

If the Salzburg Hagen Quartet excels in fastidious precision and extraordinary detail, the Petersen Quartet(t) might broadly be considered their Berlin analogue for grit and drive. Once you have heard them in concert or on one of their CDs it is difficult not to be enthralled by them.

Had the Petersen Quartet a bigger, more international record company behind them, they would be better known outside Germany – although two tours in the US in 2005 (including a stop in Washington) have spread the word about their mix of technical excellence, emotional commitment, and challenging, stimulating programming.

Most unfortunately their label of 16 years, Capriccio, has just been dragged into bankruptcy by its parent company Delta Music. One can only hope that the unofficial successor label to Capriccio, Phoenix Edition (apt name), will continue to record them*, make available back catalog**, and perhaps even finish their Beethoven cycle-in-progress.

Ernst Krenek, String Quartets 3 & 5, Petersen Quartett, Capriccio

The second-to-last recording the Petersen Quartet issued on Capriccio is indicative of their strengths: It’s the second part of an unofficial Ernst Krenek String Quartet cycle containing Quartets Nos. 3 and 5. And although the music takes getting used to for all but those ears deeply steeped in the harsher examples of 20^th century string quartet writing, it whets the appetite for the other 4 Quartets of Krenek (pronounced, as per his own insisting, with hard "K") they have not yet been recorded.

Krenek is a composer who has achieved a permanent place in the pantheon of music through historic importance, more so than awareness of his work. His opera “Jonny Spielt Auf” defined a musical schism in Europe and rang in a new era of music when it shocked and fascinated audiences in 1927. “Jonny” was pitched against Korngold’s sumptuous, romantic opera “Das Wunder der Heliane”, a cigarette (still available) was named after it, and it plays a prominent role in the chapter on Berlin in the 20s of Alex Ross’ “The Rest is Noise”. All that makes seem Krenek a far-away composer, part of the pre-World War II past in the way Korngold or Joseph Marx or Franz Mittler are thought of – not a composer who lived until 1991 and who covers about as many musical styles as the 20^th century offered (including experiments with electronic music), and who retraced the musical development of pre-War Europe in a post-Schubertian sort of Winterreise (Reisebuch, op.62, 1929).

On the Petersen Quartet’s recording we are faced with Krenek the youthful composer of string quartets, starting with his Third Quartet from 1921, written in a time when he was (briefly) married to Anna Mahler and moving away from the “mercilessly dissonant style of [his] youth” (Krenek). It Superficially resembles the Bartók quartets, but without the whipping, driving rhythms of his Hungarian colleague. There is not much that would remind of his teacher Schreker or his mentor Zemlinsky, who was fascinated when he heard this work premiered by the dedicatee Hindemith’s Amor Quartet.

For ears less attuned to structural and compositional qualities in ‘difficult’ music than Zemlinsky’s, it will take repeat listening to unlock the severe beauty and the wealth of ideas that the Peterson Quartet so arduously advocates. Perhaps better turn to the Fifth Quartet first: “The highpoint of Krenek’s use of the Schubertian aesthetic” is a (apparently) common description of his op.65, but not terribly meaningful to these ears. What I do hear is a highly chromatic lament and farewell to tonality. It’s a bear of a quartet, about 40 minutes long, opening with a sonata-form Allegro, meandering through 10 thematic variations for its second movement and closing with a 12 minute Phantasie. This is wistful, intense stuff and sounds more than three years apart from Krenek’s first dodecaphonic opera Karl V that would follow in 1933 (preceding Lulu by one year). Jarring and sweet, lyrical and wondrously twisted, these 40 minutes are like a last panoply of a dying musical style. A beached whale of tonality, strange and out of place and continually fascinating: another example that Krenek cannot be pinned down to any style or even stylistic trajectory.

The first Krenek disc of Conrad Muck & Daniel Bell (violin), Friedemann Weigle (viola), and Henry-David Varema (cello) – was a prize winning effort. This one should be prize-winning, too.

Follow @ClassicalCritic

* Apparently they do: A disc with Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet, Webern's incredibly beautiful Langsamer Satz, and Berg's Lyric Suite (with none less than Christine Schäfer taking the soprano parts) has just been issued. [Update: WETA review here.] And more good news: Since Phoenix/Capriccio is distributed by NAXOS, their discs should be widely available in the US, which was not the case when Capriccio was still part of Delta Music.

** The fate of Capriccio's catalog has yet to be decided by the liquidators. [Update: Capriccio was also sold and thus salvaged to its founder, J.Kernmayer, and is thriving again.]

{Edit: Capriccio survived, Phoenix was incorporated back into Capriccio, and Capriccio has since been taken over by Naxos but is still run by its founder.}

Feast of St. Augustine

Christophe Cochet (attrib.), Didon, Musée du Louvre (17th c.)

The Latin I loved; not what my first masters, but what the so-called grammarians taught me. For those first lessons, reading, writing and arithmetic, I thought as great a burden and penalty as any Greek. And yet whence was this too, but from the sin and vanity of this life, because I was flesh, and a breath that passes away and comes not again? For those first lessons were better certainly, because more certain; by them I obtained, and still retain, the power of reading what I find written, and myself writing what I will; whereas in the others, I was forced to learn the wanderings of one Aeneas, forgetful of my own, and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love; the while, with dry eyes, I endured my miserable self dying among these things, far from Thee, O God my life.

For what more miserable than a miserable being who commiserates not himself; weeping the death of Dido for love of Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love of Thee, O God. Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who gives vigor to my mind, who quickens my thoughts, I loved Thee not. I committed fornication against Thee, and all around me thus fornicating there echoed “Well done! well done!” for the friendship of this world is fornication against Thee; and “Well done! well done!” echoes on till one is ashamed not to he thus a man. And for all this I wept not, I who wept for Dido slain, and “seeking by the sword a stroke and wound extreme,” myself seeking the while a worse extreme, the extremest and lowest of Thy creatures, having forsaken Thee, earth passing into the earth. And if forbidden to read all this, I was grieved that I might not read what grieved me. Madness like this is thought a higher and a richer learning, than that by which I learned to read and write.

[...] Let not either buyers or sellers of grammar-learning cry out against me. For if I question them whether it be true that Aeneas came on a time to Carthage, as the poet tells, the less learned will reply that they know not, the more learned that he never did. But should I ask with what letters the name “Aeneas” is written, every one who has learnt this will answer me aright, as to the signs which men have conventionally settled. If, again, I should ask which might be forgotten with least detriment to the concerns of life, reading and writing or these poetic fictions? who does not foresee what all must answer who have not wholly forgotten themselves? I sinned, then, when as a boy I preferred those empty to those more profitable studies, or rather loved the one and hated the other. “One and one, two”; “two and two, four”; this was to me a hateful singsong: “the wooden horse lined with armed men,” and “the burning of Troy,” and “Creusa's shade and sad similitude,” were the choice spectacle of my vanity.

-- Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 1 (A.D. 397-398), trans. Albert C. Outler

Today is the feast day of Saint Augustine, which is very appropriate for the opening of school. The above is the saint's account of how he loved literature as a youth, especially the story of Dido and Aeneas in the great epic of Vergil.